Arsa

Eighteen-year-old Arsa lives at the edge of the world. The island she loves and has always lived on is a nature reserve and her job is to collect the rubbish that is washed up by the sea. Inspired by her father’s sculptures, Arsa remodels the objects that she finds, giving them a new life. Her days pass by in a time suspended between her universe of monsters and statues lost on the seabed and the humanity that she stares at from afar. When Andrea and his friends arrive on the island and invade her territory, the spell is broken...

COMMENTARY
The first feature-length fiction film by the artistic duo Masbedo (Nicolò Massazza and Iacopo Bedogni) is set on Stromboli, which has previously featured in some of their works and video installations. It is an extraordinary coming together of imagery and words (thanks to the collaboration with author Giorgio Vasta), with a complex construction, in multiple times and multiple places. Masbedo attempt a cinema that does not resemble anything else (even if the gaze is at times reminiscent of Stromboli, Land of God), is rigorously made for the big screen, and explores new ways of recounting through images.

DIRECTOR'S STATEMENT
This film comes from a memory that, as often happens, does not belong to either of us. Beatrice Bulgari, the producer of the film, remembered one of our works - Le Voeu - in which inside an aquarium a woman’s hand, having turned to stone, awaits pleadingly.
And she suggested: “Imagine if one day, swimming in the sea, you were confronted by an ancient statue.” To exorcise the anxiety that this image brings with it, as children usually do, together we created a story that is a mix of reality and imagination, in a timeless setting. Arsa is also a critical reflection on contemporary society and consumerism.